“Stop,” he said. “You told me you did not quite know your name: what did they call you as far back as you can remember?” “Clare Porson,” answered the boy. At the first word the captain gave a little cry, but repressed his emotion, and went on. His face was very white, and his breath came and went quickly. “Why did you say you did not _quite_ know your name?” “My father and mother called me by their name because there was nobody to tell them what my real name was.” “Then they weren’t your own father and mother that gave you the name?” “No, sir. I’m but using theirs till I get my own. I shall one day.” “Why do you think so?” “Don’t _you_ think, sir, that everything will come right one day?” “God grant it!” responded the captain with a groan, self-reproached for the little faith beside the strong desire. “Do you think it wrong, sir, to use a name that is not quite my own?” said Clare. “People sometimes seem to think so.” “Not at all, my boy! You must have a name. You did not steal it. They gave it you.” The look of the boy when he thus answered him, completely restored sir Harry’s confidence in his mental soundness, while both the mode and the nature of his answer to every question he put to him, bore the strongest impress of truth. “If the boy be a liar,” he said to himself, “I will never more trust my kind. I will turn to the wild-beasts, and believe in panthers and hyenas!” “They did, sir,” answered Clare. “Mr. Porson gave me his own name, and he was a clergyman. So I thought afterwards, when I had to think about it, that it couldn’t be wrong to use it.” But how could sir Harry palter so with himself? He might have got at the necessary facts so much quicker! Sir Harry shrank from seeing his suddenly wakened hope, dead for many a year, crumble before his eyes. He dared not yet drive question close. “Did Mr. Porson give you both your names?” he asked. “No, sir. My mother said I brought the first with me. She said I told them--I don’t remember myself--that my name was Clare.” The captain drove back the words that threatened to break from his lips in spite of him. His boy’s name was Clarence, but his mother, whose dearest friend was a _Clara_, called her child always _Clare_! “I mean my second mother, sir,” explained Clare; “my own mother is in the dome of the angels.” A flash lightened from the captain’s eyes, but he seemed to himself to have gone blind. Clare saw the flash, and wondered. Again _the dome of the angels_! The words burst into meaning. Out of the depths of the world of life rose to his mind’s eye the terrible thing that had made him a lonely man. Again he stood with his head thrown back, looking up at the Assumption of the Virgin painted in that awful dome; again the earthquake seized the church, and shook the painted heaven down upon them. He knew no more. His little boy had been standing near him, holding his mother’s hand, but staring up like his father! He had to force the next words from his throat.